Expelled(18)

I smile at her. “I know the feeling,” I say. “My mom’s never home because she works all the time. So why bother?”

“I sort of have the opposite problem,” Sasha says. “My dad—” Then she stops.

“What?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing, never mind. So what do we do now?”

And what I say—without even meaning to—is “Do you want to fish?”

Immediately I regret it. What a stupid question! A girl like Sasha Ellis doesn’t want to fish. And for a second she glances back toward the driveway, like maybe she wishes she’d left with the others.

Then she says, quietly, “Why not?”

And because I don’t know what else to do, I get the pole from the shed, and from the garden I pluck a giant night crawler for bait.

“Don’t look,” I say as I slice off his back half and impale it on the hook.

She does look, though, and it makes her shudder.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Don’t apologize to me,” she says.

“Sorry, worm,” I say. “But you’ll regenerate another tail, so don’t worry.”

We walk to the end of the long dock, and I set down the tackle box. I cast the line into the center of the pond, and then I hand Sasha the fishing pole. The red-and-white bobber floats in the placid water.

“What am I supposed to do with it?” Sasha asks.

“You just sit and wait, basically. It’s kind of boring, I guess. That’s why fishing usually involves beer.”

The truth is, I love fishing—my dad and I used to do it every weekend—but I don’t see how I could explain that to her, not in a way that would make her understand.

She looks skeptically at the pole. “I guess I thought there was more to it.”

Out of the corner of my eye I watch her profile. I feel like I should talk more now—or somehow attempt to entertain her—but I’m not Jude, and that kind of thing doesn’t come so easily to me. You need to say something smart, Theo, I think, and then I hear myself saying, “Well, Hemingway was a fisherman…”

“Yeah, The Old Man and the Sea,” Sasha says. “I read that one.”

I haven’t, but I decide not to admit it. “Once, when he was trying to pull in this big marlin, a bunch of sharks started attacking it. So he brought out a submachine gun and shot them all.”

“That’s horrible,” Sasha says.

“Yeah, and it didn’t even work, because all that blood just made the surviving sharks go crazy.”

She shudders again. “I wouldn’t care if I didn’t catch anything ever.”

But even as she says this, the bobber dips down under the water. “Look, you’ve got something!” I yell.

The pole bends toward the pond, and Sasha struggles to turn the reel.

“It might be big,” I say. I can’t keep the excitement from my voice.

As the bobber comes closer, the fish bucks and thrashes on the line, pulling it under again. The pole arcs dangerously low. “Keep reeling,” I say, “come on!”

“I’m trying,” Sasha yells.

The fish splashes wildly by the end of the dock, and I reach down and grab the line with my hands. And then I gasp. “No way—you caught him.”

Sasha looks worried. “What do you mean?”

Spinning and flopping on the end of the line is the fish my dad used to call Grandpa Bass. He’s two feet long and ten pounds at least. “This is the dude my dad tried to catch for years.”

“How can you tell?” Sasha asks.

I lay him down on the dock and put my foot on his heaving side to hold him still. Besides the hook we caught him with, there are three old fishhooks embedded forever in his gaping mouth. “There,” I say. “The evidence.”

I don’t know whether to be happy that Sasha caught him or sad that my dad and I never did.

I’m leaning toward the second option.

The fish struggles under my foot, and I’m amazed at how strong he is. How full of life. If only my dad were here to see this—he’d cackle with triumph and run to grab a fillet knife. A stab of grief shoots through me as I reach down to pull my hook out of the bass’s bony lip.

“Let’s eat him,” I say, reaching for my own knife in the tackle box. “He’ll be good.”

Sasha looks at me in horror.

“What?” I ask. “You said you were a pescatarian.”

Without a word, she reaches out and shoves me. I lose my balance, and my foot slips off the fish. Before I can protest, she’s picked him up and flung him back into the water.

She turns to me, eyes blazing. “That’s where he belongs,” she says. “Not on top of a grill.”

I watch the ripples he made spread and fade. I’ll probably never see that beautiful bass again. “Okay,” I say, my voice sounding a little choked. “That’s fine. It’s not a big deal.”

I sit down on the end of the dock then, and she folds herself next to me. We’re so close that our arms are almost touching. We drop our feet into the water.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “But I’m also not.”

“I know,” I say. “I take it your dad doesn’t fish.”